(02:55) Jon asks Matt to overview React. Matt explains how React handles views, components, and unidirectional databinding. Matt says it’s nice that it moves us towards the component model in the HTML world – moving away from the jQuery direct DOM manipulation approach to a more holistic approach.

(05:40) Jon says that he thinks that components introduce some problems of their own and asks Matt how React avoids that complexity. Matt says that’s why Flux and Redux were introduced.

(06:35) Jon asks what React Native is. Eric explains that React Native allows you to take the same concepts and tool used for building React web applications and use them to build native applications. It started at Facebook and has picked up a lot open source momentum.

How React Native compares to Cordova, Xamarin, etc.

(07:33) Jon says there’s always heated discussion when you talk about building native applications using web technology. What’s the overhead? Is this similar to Cordova? Eric explains the differences.

(08:50) Kevin asks you’d build a native application with React when there are lots of great native development tools out there. Eric talks about some of the advantages of building your application’s UI in JavaScript. Also, shipping updates as JavaScript files using CodePush can be a lot simpler than shipping a new binary for every update. Matt says you can also focus your development team on building the same application for all platforms using React skills rather than separate focus and development skills for each platform.

(11:22) Jon asks where React Native fits in on the scale from Cordova to more native tools like Xamarin.

(13:35) Jon asks how UWP fits into React Native and how they implemented it technically. Eric says they took a look at how React Android was built and used that as a guide. He discusses how they handled the runtime, and how the application JavaScript is handled by Chakra.

(15:50) Jon asks about the application is hosted. Eric explains that they first create and navigate to a XAML page, then there’s an initial call to start the JavaScript engine with the application name, then sends back over the bridge a bunch of operations against the UI Manager. The UI Manager will then create subviews and construct the UI tree. In the React view, you have a virtual DOM that represents your UI; that gets translated to operations that are sent over the bridge to create a native UI tree.

(17:30) Jon asks about how elements are styled, since from his experience that’s all done using CSS styles. Eric says they use a subset of CSS called Flexbox using a library by a developer from Facebook. Matt says when they ported over the F8 app to Windows, they leveraged the same styles and platform specific style pattern that had been used for iOS and Android.

(19:23) Jon asks what was most difficult in moving the F8 application to Windows. Eric says the styling part was pretty easy. The hardest part was in handling platform specific support. Matt describes an issue with linear gradient support.

(21:00) Jon asks how they handle data flow. Eric says they use Relay, which runs on top of GraphQL. It all just moved directly over. Matt says that’s the beauty of this – if there’s something written directly in JavaScript it just works.

(21:55) Jon asks about any other platform specific issues. Eric says that it’s conceptually similar to Xamarin in that are you need to keep in mind that you’re writing to a native front end experience. He explains that it’s a happy medium between web front-end (Cordova) and native in that the simple UI components like text are easily shared, but you can target more platform specific controls as needed. He talks about some differences in things like menus, split views and carousels.

(23:50) Jon asks about the cross-platform development experience? Do you use a lot of emulators? Eric says he mostly works on Windows using the Visual Studio Android Emulator. He says when he’s adding a new feature to React Native for Windows, he’ll pop open the Android emulator and use the UI explorer. Matt says he also uses Android Studio and Xcode.

(25:44) Jon asks if there’s a long build step, or if there’s a quick feedback cycle. Eric says that React is built to make the developer experience really fast, and explains how hot module reloading makes it possible to see application code changes without reloading or even losing current running state. Matt says that you also get the full Chrome debugging experience.

(27:15) Jon asks how you package your application for publishing. Matt talks about the publishing steps.

(28:10) Jon asks about the rnpm (React Native Package Manager) command-line tool. Eric explains how rnpm helps you include dependencies in your React Native applications. It’s extensible, so Eric and Matt used that to implement the Windows scaffolding experience.

(29:52) Jon says that in the scaffolded application he got when he ran rnpm, there are OS specific files for each view and asks if it’s possible to use a consolidated view for all platforms when appropriate. Eric says you’ll generally need a platform-specific entry point for each OS, but once you get past that you can do quite a bit with the core React Native elements.

(33:20) Jon asks how he actually runs the application as he’s developing it. Matt says they just read in from the command-line to start the packager and build and run the application using Visual Studio. The docs currently say Visual Studio is required, although that isn’t necessarily the case if you kick off your build using msbuild.

(34:30) Jon asks if it could be possible to create a React Native Windows application on Mac or Linux, or if you’ll always need Windows due to the SDK. Matt says you’ll always need the SDKs, but Eric points out that there is a web-based React Native Playground (rnplay.org), and they’d like to reach out to them to get Windows support added.

(35:33) Jon asks if anyone is using it beyond the F8 application. Matt says not yet, they’re still working on the dev experience before they start heavily onboarding people. Jon asks who’s using React Native in general and Matt points out the React Native Showcase.

(36:50) Since part of the idea of UWP is that it runs on multiple Windows platforms, Jon asks if they’ve done anything with that. Eric talks about how part of their F8 demonstration included showing the application on Xbox, mobile devices with Continuum and desktop. They’re interested in looking into HoloLens and IoT as well.

(38:00) Jon asks if it’d be possible to leverage React web code in a React Native application. Eric says that at F8 he saw a talk on the possibility of bringing React Native to web. There are definite sharing points in code between web applications and React Native apps, although you should expect to write native views, and points out that there is work going on to bring React Native to Tizen and macOS.

(39:35) Jon asks if React Native for Windows is a science project or an ongoing project. Eric and Matt say they’ll be watching for community interest. They expect to keep up with React Native releases, and are hoping for community contributions. Eric says there are hundreds of React Native community modules, and they can’t scale to supporting all of them without some community involvement.

(42:18) Kevin asks about the testing story – can you write unit tests and integration tests for React Native? Eric says it’s similar to building large cross-stack applications with tests for services and clients – where you write integration tests between your JavaScript libraries and native code, unit tests for native modules, and tools like Jest for your pure JavaScript components.

(01:58) Jon notes that they’re using Windows and CentOS and asks why CentOS as opposed to other Linux flavors. Nick says they tried Ubuntu first, but it’s more tuned for clients. CentOS is a variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so all the packages work.

(02:53) Nick says that they use whatever’s the best tool for each job – factoring in the costs of each new tool (training, migrating, supporting, vendor overhead, etc.). They run Elastic Search, Redis, HAProxy and Logstash.

(03:50) Jon asks about how they’re using protobuf to serialize the information they’re persisting Redis. Nick talks about some specifics, including the different levels of caching that they’re doing. They’re using pub / sub with Redis via websockets. They’re not clustering, partly because there’s one Redis cache per SE site. He and Jon discuss how multitenant scenarios often require custom implementations.

(07:20) Jon asks about how they’re using websockets. Nick says that they’re used in a lot of places for optional updates. Their problems come from running on very few servers – they end up with huge connection tables per server.

(08:23) Jon asks about one of their Redis instances that’s handling machine learning with Providence. Nick says they log some metadata and performance information about about every single request. Providence is a system their data team wrote that analyzes the data, figures out locations, suggested user tags, etc. As a user, you have control over the personalization and can download the data or disable recommendations if you want. There’s also a mobile feed, for mobile apps as well. There are 40k ops/sec all day long against Redis. Scott K asks if he can manipulate his feed.

(11:51) Scott K asks about the L1 and L2 cache that Nick’s talked about. Nick clarifies that he’s been referring to HTTP caching on the web server and Redis caching.

(19:48) Jon asks about the Elastic Search implementation. Elastic Search doesn’t really support types, it has field groupings, which makes the upgrade more difficult. Nick explains that things are pretty vanilla now, but they’d like to make some customizations to support nested search results when time permits.

(21:49) Jon asks what version of SQL Server they’re using. Nick says they’re currently running the latest version of SQL Server 2014 and will move to SQL Server 2016 as soon as it releases. [Note: SQL Server 2016 has since released and they’ve upgraded.]

(22:11) Nick talks about some of the top reasons they’re looking forward to SQL Server 2016: string_split and JSON parsing. These are both useful for queries that take a list as a parameter. Jon reminisces about a time long ago when he used XML to pass lists to SQL queries.

(23:32) Kevin asks if they’re able to do a piecemeal migration without downtime. Nick explains how they do upgrades using replicas. They can test on other replicas, then fail over to them, or roll back to the previous master. They hate Windows clustering, and Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016 should soon support distributed affinity groups which would allow them to do simple affinity group based upgrades.

(26:35) Jon asks if they use SQL Server Hekaton / In-Memory OLTP. Nick says they don’t, they run enough memory in their database servers that it’s not needed. Nick says it’s more for high-frequency no-lock access.

(29:27) Jon asks about how they handle migrations. Nick explains how changing tables is handled via a migration file and a ten line bot.

Source Control, Localization, Build

(30:47) Jon asks about their use of GitLab. Nick says it works okay, but they’re testing GitHub Enterprise internally due to performance. GitHub is significantly faster, search works a lot better (due to using Postgres search rather than Elastic Search), and there are some nice new features in GitHub like squashing commits.

(32:23) Jon asks about the localization features and is educated about the ja, ru, pt and es versions of stackoverflow. Nick explains some of the different localization issues that you run into in localization. Most localization solution work by string replacement, which requires string allocations. That doesn’t work at scale. They’ve written a system called Moonspeak which uses Roslyn to precompile view. This allows a direct response.write of the localized string via switch statements, which is a lot more efficient. They haven’t had time to open source it yet, but would like to.

(36:36) Jon asks about their build process using MSBuild. They use it mostly because it’s what the tooling uses. They could customize it more with PowerShell, but that would tie them more to TeamCity and Nick’s not sure there’s a benefit to making that move. Nick’s waiting to see where csproj is going – he’s got some big doubts it’ll be as terse as project.json, but he’s interested to see. Nick says historically MSBuild has been optimized for three-way merge generation; Jon says that was technically Visual Studio’s fault since MSBuild actually has had glob support for a while.

Upcoming Technologies, Visual Studio

(40:35) Nick complains about how slow Visual Studio is to reload projects. Their developers have scripts that just kill and restart Visual Studio, because that’s faster than handling project reloads.

(41:16) Jon asks if Nick’s played with Visual Studio “15”. Nick wonders about the technology used in the installer. He says it’s generally good, but they’re running into some issues with solution files changing when moving between versions.

(42:33) Nick says that they generally don’t ever use File / New, they copy an existing project and rename things. There’s a discussion about whether it’s possible to customize project templates. Jon says you can export a project as a solution template; K Scott mentions that SideWaffle has some capabilities there, too, but there was some “wonkiness”. And what’s the deal with GUIDs in project and solution files?

(46:09) Scott K mentions a command line base project generator that he started on years ago called ProjectStarter. He wishes that it was possible to configure Visual Studio to define a custom build tool rather than assuming everything’s in csproj. He gets that Visual Studio features like IntelliSense depend on controlling the build, but doesn’t like that Visual Studio has to “know everything about everything”.

(48:55) Jon says he sees two ways that cross-platform can work: either make the frameworks able to work without the tools knowing and controlling everything, or updating Visual Studio Code so it’s able to know and control everything. He hopes it’s the first way.

(49:50) Nick complains about how sometimes in-memory builds don’t reflect changes, or csproj doesn’t save before a build. He’d like everything to save before builds. Scott K calls out the Save All The Time extension for Visual Studio that Paul Betts made.

(50:40) Jon asks Nick if they’ve looked at ASP.NET Core. Nick says that they’ll mostly be starting with their internal tools. They have several libs that they’ll need to port, and they’ve got some difficult problems with libraries like MiniProfiler that need to support both .NET 4.x and .NET Core because the underlying APIs have some significant differences. You can’t just multi-target code that targets things like HttpContext. Other libraries like dapper and stackexchange-redis haven’t been as bad, and they’ve been working on them because lots of other developers are depending on them.

(55:03) Jon calls out some of Nick’s recent C# 6 tweets. Nick says he likes null coalescing and ternaries – they see more terse code as a lot more readable, but it of course varies by team. Roslyn has been really big for them, things like Moonspeak rely on it.

Questions from Twitter

(56:23) Matt Warren asks “What performance issues have you had the most fun finding and fixing.” Nick mentions the tag engine and a fun debugging issue they ran into where the TimeSpan int constructor uses Ticks rather than seconds or milliseconds, so their cache code was only caching values for tiny fractions of a second rather than thirty seconds. They find out so many issues using MiniProfiler; he wishes more developers would use MiniProfiler (or another tool like Glimpse) in their applications. They run MiniProfiler for every single request on StackOverflow and the overhead is minimal – if they can do it, you can do it.

(58:17) Matt Warren asks “What the craziest thing they’ve done to increase performance.” Nick talks about the IL related work they’ve done – sometimes instead of conditional code, it’s faster to just swap out the method body. They’re pragmatic, they only do this for extreme cases like things that run for every request and have real performance implications. What’s the trick for StackOverflow? Keep it simple.

Show Notes:

Bash on Windows and Windows Insider stuff

(00:44) Jon mentions the Bash on Windows announcement at Build and asks if Kevin or K Scott have played with it. This devolves into a discussion of Windows Insider previews. Jon likes it and talks about the steps for enabling Windows Insider preview builds. K Scott has been scared to try it, but it sounds like he’s convinced. Kevin is put off by the Insider term – Windows Insider, Visual Studio Code Insider previews, etc. K Scott adds “Windows Insider” it to his e-mail signature.

(05:15) Jon talks about the steps for enabling Bash on Windows. or Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta), to use the official terminology.

(07:08) Feel the excitement of listening to someone type commands into a console window as Kevin asks questions about what’s installed and Jon tries to apt-get it all. K Scott and Kevin wonder about how things like filesystem and processes work, and Jon tries to make up answers.

(09:50) Kevin says it feels like an admission of defeat to add *nix support to Windows. Jon says it feels practical to him – developers are building for multiple operating systems (especially including mobile), so it’s nice to have it supported.

(11:19) Kevin’s ready for Cygwin to die in a fire, and Jon’s excited about ssh working less horribly on Windows. Kevin says the race is on to get Wine working on Bash on Windows.

Angular 2 and React

(12:55) Jon worked on a hands on lab for Build that had master-details using Angular 2 and ASP.NET Core. He said Angular 2 seemed a lot simpler than Angular 1 now. K Scott said the component model is simpler, but he’s seeing some resistance to the ECMAScript / TypeScript updates, new binding syntax, etc. The Angular 1.5 release also includes a component model that’s a much easier programming model. It almost feels like some older Microsoft component-based programming frameworks going back to Visual Basic 6: you’re working with components that have simple properties and events. The guys speculate on how soon someone will build the big visual editor for Angular 2.

(16:21) Kevin says TypeScript seems like a barrier. K Scott says it’s not strictly required. He rejected TypeScript for a while, but when he was working with Angular 2 and tools and editors supported it he decided he liked it. Jon and K Scott talk about how a lot of things that throw people off about TypeScript are really just modern JavaScript syntax.

(18:50) The guys discuss how Angular 2 and React mindshare will play out. Jon likes React as long as he never views source. Jon thinks the unidirectional flow is really simple, and Kevin agrees – after years of lower level Backbone, the simpler flow in React saves some mental energy.

(20:29) Jon mentions that React Native recently came to Windows, too.

Devices: Surface Book, Kindle and big batteries

(20:56) K Scott got a new Surface Book (after waiting to make sure nothing new was coming out at Build). He says it’s the best piece of PC hardware he’s bought in years – the build quality is good, the keyboard is good, he gives the trackpad of 9 out of 10. He says that the detachable tablet is a bit large as a tablet, so he’s using an older Surface for reading.

(23:58) Jon jokes that K Scott’s not likely to buy a Kindle and says he gradually stopped using his Kindle when he moved to Audiobooks, and kind of associates reading with work now. Kevin says that’s sad. They talk about Kindles for kids’ books.

(27:07) Kevin says the two big things he picked up for the new Kindle are physical page buttons and a three month battery. He says the main thing he likes about Kindle for both him and his kids (as opposed to a tablet) is that it forces you to read instead of getting distracted. The guys decide that tripling the life of an already one month battery isn’t a huge win.

(29:20) Jon says he recently bought a portable battery that can recharge his laptop, which is handy for long flights. (note: he said it was iPad size, it’s a lot smaller but is 1.2 pounds)

(31:15) Jon asks Kevin about new Apple hardware. Kevin says the iPad Pro screen is apparently astounding – he’s expecting them to be amazing in a few generations. Same for Apple Watch – he doesn’t have one yet, he’s waiting for version two. Jon says the improvement from Microsoft Band 1 to Band 2 was pretty nice, especially in the industrial design.

Lightning Round: Will Windows Phone be dead in one year?

(33:40) K Scott asks if Windows Phone will be dead in a year. Jon hopes not, as he just bought a Lumia 950 XL. He’d had a budget Blu Windows Phone since September, and the Windows 10 Insider builds were nice, but the camera wasn’t very good. He really likes Windows 10 as a phone operating system and thinks it’s sad that so few people will actually see it.

(35:55) K Scott got a Lumia 950 XL in January (when he dropped something on his previous phone). He got the docking station, too, and said it worked surprisingly well. The guys discuss how useful docking a phone is; Jon postulates that it could be useful for someone who does everything on their phone and occasionally needs to write a long email or edit their resume – especially if it can be hooked up to a TV.

(38:30) Kevin says that Windows Phone isn’t dead. it’s undead. It will linger on in a zombie-like state indefinitely.

Scott Koon sends us out with a request for further information by e-mail.

Kevin, K Scott and Jon talk about Bash support in the new Windows Insider builds, their thoughts on Angular 2, K Scott’s new Surface Book, some general apathy on Kindles, and whether Windows Phone is alive, dead, or undead.

Show Notes:

Bash on Windows and Windows Insider stuff

(00:44) Jon mentions the Bash on Windows announcement at Build and asks if Kevin or K Scott have played with it. This devolves into a discussion of Windows Insider previews. Jon likes it and talks about the steps for enabling Windows Insider preview builds. K Scott has been scared to try it, but it sounds like he’s convinced. Kevin is put off by the Insider term – Windows Insider, Visual Studio Code Insider previews, etc. K Scott adds “Windows Insider” it to his e-mail signature.

(05:15) Jon talks about the steps for enabling Bash on Windows. or Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta), to use the official terminology.

(07:08) Feel the excitement of listening to someone type commands into a console window as Kevin asks questions about what’s installed and Jon tries to apt-get it all. K Scott and Kevin wonder about how things like filesystem and processes work, and Jon tries to make up answers.

(09:50) Kevin says it feels like an admission of defeat to add *nix support to Windows. Jon says it feels practical to him – developers are building for multiple operating systems (especially including mobile), so it’s nice to have it supported.

(11:19) Kevin’s ready for Cygwin to die in a fire, and Jon’s excited about ssh working less horribly on Windows. Kevin says the race is on to get Wine working on Bash on Windows.

Angular 2 and React

(12:55) Jon worked on a hands on lab for Build that had master-details using Angular 2 and ASP.NET Core. He said Angular 2 seemed a lot simpler than Angular 1 now. K Scott said the component model is simpler, but he’s seeing some resistance to the ECMAScript / TypeScript updates, new binding syntax, etc. The Angular 1.5 release also includes a component model that’s a much easier programming model. It almost feels like some older Microsoft component-based programming frameworks going back to Visual Basic 6: you’re working with components that have simple properties and events. The guys speculate on how soon someone will build the big visual editor for Angular 2.

(16:21) Kevin says TypeScript seems like a barrier. K Scott says it’s not strictly required. He rejected TypeScript for a while, but when he was working with Angular 2 and tools and editors supported it he decided he liked it. Jon and K Scott talk about how a lot of things that throw people off about TypeScript are really just modern JavaScript syntax.

(18:50) The guys discuss how Angular 2 and React mindshare will play out. Jon likes React as long as he never views source. Jon thinks the unidirectional flow is really simple, and Kevin agrees – after years of lower level Backbone, the simpler flow in React saves some mental energy.

(20:29) Jon mentions that React Native recently came to Windows, too.

Devices: Surface Book, Kindle and big batteries

(20:56) K Scott got a new Surface Book (after waiting to make sure nothing new was coming out at Build). He says it’s the best piece of PC hardware he’s bought in years – the build quality is good, the keyboard is good, he gives the trackpad of 9 out of 10. He says that the detachable tablet is a bit large as a tablet, so he’s using an older Surface for reading.

(23:58) Jon jokes that K Scott’s not likely to buy a Kindle and says he gradually stopped using his Kindle when he moved to Audiobooks, and kind of associates reading with work now. Kevin says that’s sad. They talk about Kindles for kids’ books.

(27:07) Kevin says the two big things he picked up for the new Kindle are physical page buttons and a three month battery. He says the main thing he likes about Kindle for both him and his kids (as opposed to a tablet) is that it forces you to read instead of getting distracted. The guys decide that tripling the life of an already one month battery isn’t a huge win.

(29:20) Jon says he recently bought a portable battery that can recharge his laptop, which is handy for long flights. (note: he said it was iPad size, it’s a lot smaller but is 1.2 pounds)

(31:15) Jon asks Kevin about new Apple hardware. Kevin says the iPad Pro screen is apparently astounding – he’s expecting them to be amazing in a few generations. Same for Apple Watch – he doesn’t have one yet, he’s waiting for version two. Jon says the improvement from Microsoft Band 1 to Band 2 was pretty nice, especially in the industrial design.

Lightning Round: Will Windows Phone be dead in one year?

(33:40) K Scott asks if Windows Phone will be dead in a year. Jon hopes not, as he just bought a Lumia 950 XL. He’d had a budget Blu Windows Phone since September, and the Windows 10 Insider builds were nice, but the camera wasn’t very good. He really likes Windows 10 as a phone operating system and thinks it’s sad that so few people will actually see it.

(35:55) K Scott got a Lumia 950 XL in January (when he dropped something on his previous phone). He got the docking station, too, and said it worked surprisingly well. The guys discuss how useful docking a phone is; Jon postulates that it could be useful for someone who does everything on their phone and occasionally needs to write a long email or edit their resume – especially if it can be hooked up to a TV.

(38:30) Kevin says that Windows Phone isn’t dead. it’s undead. It will linger on in a zombie-like state indefinitely.

Scott Koon sends us out with a request for further information by e-mail.

(00:54) JG asks Jon if he showed off any scary hacks. Jon describes an attack in which they made an executable editable both on disk and in memory, then edited both the IL and assembly code to do things like inject direct database attacks (bypassing . He describes how that could be defended using enterprise defensible architecture by talking to databases through services which can implement security layers. The goal is to prevent an attack at one layer from moving through the rest of the enterprise.

(1:59) JG says that often hears that major hacks occur by web application attacks that are then escalated to database attacks, often through password reuse. Jon says that’s true, since web applications are often deployed to the same server as a database or authentication server. He recommends using a service that’s locked to a single port, with security unit tests.

(2:43) JG asks which patterns he’s describing are unique to .NET development. Jon says that he’s emphasizing patterns that are easy on .NET – for example, REST services are easy to implement on .NET as compared to C++. He’s advocating architectural changes that are relatively easy to implement in .NET applications provided you start with them early on (rather than trying to retrofit security later).

A specific example: Protecting a medical record

(3:33) JG asks for some specific examples. Jon says they talked about security unit tests and user stories and gives and example from his talk about a medical record that’s being sent through an enterprise securely. To do that, you’d need to encrypt it on an edge node, so the web server and database don’t have decrypted data or decryption keys. Instead, you use a key server on a segmented network. Because of this, at no point could a sysadmin have gotten access to the record because it was encrypted at all steps.

"Above Admin"

(4:49) JG points out that Jon is talking about preventing access to sensitive data by sysadmins. Jon says that you should consider your attackers to have more power than a sysadmin – they refer to attacker privileges as "above admin" because they’ve taken over your AD infrastructure, passwords on routers, dropping new firmware, etc.

(5:50) JG refers to James Mickens’ keynote from the previous night (Herding Code interview here) and asks if there’s any hope. Jon says you need to plan, you need to minimize pivot points to prevent an attacker from moving between servers. He discusses potentially using static HTML that calls into secured REST services rather than web applications with direct database access, because building security around a REST service is much easier than securing a web application and web server.

Mobile and desktop application security

(9:03) JG asks about mobile application security, since he frequently hears about mobile apps that are supported by unsecured (or very poorly secured) backend services. Jon refers to Amazon and Twitter as examples of companies with published patterns for secured backend services.

(9:52) JG asks if for some tips on how different systems on the network should be secured, referring to desktop applications. Jon says that each system should defend itself from the other systems, so in this case the other systems should assume that the desktops could be compromised, the desktop applications should assumed the database can be compromised, there needs to be thought about defending the outgoing APIs, etc. There needs to be a plan for how to take things down and respond.

What do you wish you’d done?

(10:35) As a thought exercise, assume that your database or web server has been compromised: what do you wish you’d have done? Do that for different pieces of your application architecture. Jon says that you can make it a fun exercise, pit dev teams against each other, etc. Security should be fun and easy if you’re doing it right.

Wave 3D: A 3D operating system front end

(12:07) JG asks Jon about the 3D operating system he’d mentioned before the call. Jon describes Wave 3D, a cross platform front-end to multiple operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android) that gives the same exact experience for all backend systems. It can be connected to Amazon, Google and Dropbox document storage.

(12:56) Jon says it’s running on Mono and Unity and says it compares pretty well with 3D operating systems in the movies, and they’re looking at launching it via Kickstarter. It provides a simple, install-free environment with a document viewer, movie player and more on every platform instantly.

Show Notes:

What’s TrackJS?

(0:20) Jon asks Todd to explain TrackJS. Todd said it’s something he built to help with difficult JavaScript debugging issues a few years ago. JavaScript applications were difficult to debug because it was hard to define the different failure states of his applications. Over time, they worked to add in diagnostic state (e.g. shopping, checkout, etc.). Over time, they added in network state and user state. Over time they came up with telemetry, which defines states and state changes, which can be a lot more helpful than a stacktrace in diagnosing and fixing an error.

Why context is more important than stack traces

(2:34) Jon agrees, saying that it’s really frustrating to try to reproduce an error as a developer, and context is really important. Todd says that stack traces are limited because applications are so asynchronous in nature now – an error may be from a timeout which was a response to an Ajax event which was a response to a user click.

(3:44) Todd says they also track a lot of general information like browser, operating system, and things like date and time information. He once spent a really long time on an error one user was experiencing on a calendaring application because they were stuck in the ’70’s (literally).

(4:56) Jon ask more about how he gets access to the reported information when he’s troubleshooting an error. Todd says there are three problems to solve.

The first problem to solve is alerting: you get daily rollups on top errors and trends.

Second, when you log in, you need to see which errors are which important (filtering out background noise like unsupported useragents, strange Chrome extensions that modify the DOM, etc.). You need to know which errors impact the most people, which cause users to leave, and which are top browser-specific errors.

Third, you need to need to be able to dig into and diagnose a specific error.

(6:45) Jon asks more about how he’d diagnose a specific error. Todd describes the contextual information TrackJS provides for an error (including things like browser, screen size, user information). For example, one issue they diagnosed recently only occurred at a specific screen size due to a responsive design which modified the page so certain elements were only displayed in a range of screen widths.

Common problem: Partial Load Failure

(8:14) Jon asks Todd what running the service has shown him are common problems that developers aren’t considering in building JavaScript apps. Todd says it’s partial loading failure – cases where most of the JavaScript assets on a page load, but just one fails. In one instance, they saw everything on a page but the Stripe library load, which caused payment data to be insecurely posted.

(10:35) Jon asks about the best way to test for and handle partial load failures.

Common problem: Same Origin Policy

(11:36) Todd explains same origin policy restrictions in loading loading libraries from other domains, and using cross-origin headers to handle that.

Business model and subscription overview

(12:30) Jon asks about the business model for TrackJS. Todd explains that they offer free service to charitable and open source projects. For paid accounts, they bill based on page views rather than error count because he feels billing based on errors creates counter-incentives for users.